Being Alive- The Journey Continues
BEING ALIVE_ What does it mean to be alive
Starting Halloween and through November an exploration and celebration of life
On this page - thoughts from inspiring human beings who bring great spirit and joy to our planet. Thank you my friends for agreeing to my request and sharing your friendship and words with me.
Terry Erwin (Curator of Entomology and world conservationist, Smithsonian Institution)
Paul Dayton (Professor Oceanography Scripps Institution of Oceanography)
Robert Shaye (Hollywood Studio Owner, Producer and Director)
Carl Safina (Author and conservationist)
Diana Bourel (Transpersonal Yogini)
What does it mean to feel alive?
Paul Dayton with all the gusto embedded in his phrase “Spiritual Vigor” reminded me of why I am still out there as marine biologist and “fighting the fight” He recalled for me the joy I’d gotten in bringing my own children to the sea. It sparked a new conversation between us. Terry Erwin’s ode wove the beauty of nature with the chance of life, death, and friendship reminded me that i live in a web of life that is constantly being broken and rewoven. As an irish woman, it’s genetic! I can’t help being moved by words and poetry and his was exquisite. I’ve shared special moment with each of these friends and it’s been an extraordinary joy to share this feeling with them too.
As I read Bob’s email I could hear the passion in his voice and see him so clearly that I felt he was here, probably somewhere in the garden among the plants. Bob’s passion brought “The Lord of The Rings” Trilogy to reality on the screen to inspire the lives of millions. Diana was physically here with me earlier in the evening and Carl’s words touched me and reminded me of a lunch we shared before I joined him house-hunting (he bought the house).
Me Feeling Alive- Yesterday, a simple one hour walk hour beach walk evolved into
a four hour hike, beating along windy shore with 50mph wind gusts and trekking among tall sand dunes. Exhausted, exhilarated, and sand scoured,
Tonight, I chose to sleep outside on the deck, to listen to the
sound of the ocean and watch for “shooting stars”
TERRY ERWIN
Ode to Green
What makes me feel alive?
Me, celebrating life! What?
Me, I think therefore I am .. for
Discoveries. For each, I strive.
I'm alive, touched, my eyes on
each new species, with awe ..
How many, where, why? More
each day, hey, but soon to be gone.
Discoveries before made, no law
prevents the inevitable gore
of my species yet unknown.
Still, when people understand
their world, and all that they saw …
Makes for changing seats, above
the law, requiring above all
a thought-leader with thunder,
at the human interface thereof
of natural ….
and human ….
made disasters!
Discoveries made safe, mastered!
Changing seats, changing life, Why?
J'attends avec impatience!
Green is more than correct, since
it makes for our global lifeboat
and only that will keep us alive to buy
an afterthought: more time I need,
more time to do many a Green Deed.
Terry Erwin
Paul Dayton
What a great idea and Samhain seems an appropriate time for a celebration of living! I had not heard your story and I am amazed. Wow...
Your request comes at an appropriate time for me as the last year or two has just been an avalanche of deaths that I have had to deal with. My younger brother fell from a ladder and was killed and several close relatives have died in the last year and as your letter came in I was just writing to my favorite uncle, now dying with family. And this summer all four of my pets died of various causes. This is not what we are celebrating here, but it puts me into a very positive attitude about celebrating living! I am trying to think of what to write; every day I think about being the luckiest person alive to have enjoyed such a rich live, and of course one tends to think of children and grandchildren but this love of others should be universal. I think that what uniquely gives me the greatest pleasure living is absorbing all the life around me. Yesterday a plant in my yard died and I found myself really sad and wondered why the loss of a plant made me so sad and I realized that I get a lot of some basic emotion from plants. How to express it, perhaps "spiritual vigor?" from being surrounded by plants that are alive in my yard, the deserts, and the high mountains. For example, being able to hold my hand on a 4,000 yr old bristlecone pine or a 2,000 yr old foxtail pine gives a sense of resilience, but then over 20 years watching tiny saplings of foxtail pines struggling to live and often dying gives me a sense of their vulnerability. Crawling around underneath the local chaparral one finds an amazing array fascinating very hardy and tough little plants such as mosses, liverwarts, and once even a slime mold. These plants truly inspire me. I am inspired with my own living almost any time I am in nature. There are high points such as the time a cougar came up to me as a sat in my sleeping bag and we made eye contact for at least 30 seconds. I was thrilled and he seemed curious before ambling off and flowing over a plant to disappear. He was not a predator to me, but a really interesting soul that was sharing the desert with me. On two occasions I have made very clear eye contact with very large tiger sharks and we just recognized each other and went about our ways. Penguins and seals have buzzed me and made eye contact and done little loops and tricks and sea lions will even engage in copy cat play. This type of interactive experience makes me feel alive, but perhaps no more so than quietly lying on the sea bottom watching a nudibranch search for dinner or kangaroo rats flitting about in the campfire light gathering seeds or the foraging scorpions in the black light grabbing an elate out of the air or catching, stinging, and crunching another scorpion or a salpugid spider darting about my sleeping bag as I awake in the desert. Recently we found a desert tortoise on top of a volcanic cone in the Pinacate desert near organ pipe, and he must have been over 100 years old stuck up there with nothing but jumping cholla to eat most of the time (his ancient turds are scattered around full of cactus spines), and sitting beside this ancient animal made me so happy to be allowed to share the earth with such a creature. Near our camp I once watched a coachwhip snake pursue and catch a zebratailed lizard, one of the fastest lizards in the world, we watched a rattlesnake moving carefully to find a spot to ambush the Kangaroo rats, and over the years I have seen 13 species of snakes. Still in this, the hottest desert outside of death valley in the western hemisphere, we find after very unusually heavy rains the tinaja tanks full of red spotted toads breeding and filling the water tanks with larvae before burying themselves to wait many years for the next big rain. All of these experiences give me so damned much joy of life that I have to say that these experiences in nature consistently are the experiences that most make me appreciate my own life.
Thank you for getting me to think about his.
"All days are the best, but this day is the most best because we are closest to it." Dana Rae-9 years old
Studio Owner, Producer and Director Robert Shaye
Dear Deborah
as you know, i, too, brushed up against death. and. like you, i'm not sure why i survived. just as the people who didn't change their seat did not, i was moved to jim henson's hospital room, in which he died. he entered the hospital , waiting a few hours longer than i, and those few hours made the difference between us. your question is easy for me to answer. i've known what my singular joy, and the source of my lifeblood is, since i was very young. it is simply to create. but not as a fine artist, for myself. as a craftsman for the pleasure of others. nothing satisfies me more. and if i am also stirred by what i make, so much the better. whether its cooking or telling stories, or making movies, that's the source of my connection to the world, and life itself.
Bob
Author and conservationist. Carl Safina
You might guess that you’d feel most alive being alone. I mean, if you were the only thing living on Mars, that would make your life at that moment pretty special. But it doesn’t seem to work that way. I feel most alive when I am surrounded and immersed among living things. In the migrations of birds and fishes that come and go along my coast, I still find sanity and solace, delight—and hope.
Please Note- From Carl’s Book The View From Lazy Point. It should be out in summer, 2010.
In it, I write:
“Albert Einstein said, ‘A human being is part of the whole, called by us Universe, a part limited in time and space. He experiences himself, his thoughts and feelings as something separate from the rest—a kind of optical delusion of his consciousness. This delusion is a kind of prison for us, restricting us to our personal desires and to affection for a few persons nearest to us. Our task must be to free ourselves from this prison.’
If you still believe you are distinct from your surroundings, try reading the next three pages while holding your breath. The point is: you are not just an entity; you are an interchange.
A living thing is a knot of passing time, flowing material, and continuous energy. From dust, energy assembles for itself the wood, leaves, bone, and muscle that we recognize as living. We are these dynamic processes in relationship to each other. All lives depend on how energy pushes matter through plants and animals. Often the matter, like carbon, nitrogen, and water, cycles through the whole community. We are a relationship to the world. Actually, we’re a tapestry of relationships.
Ecology—a term coined by the German Ernst Haeckel in 1866 from the Greek word for ‘household’—reveals a world where each individual seed, each creature, is an experiment, testing the waters with its own uniqueness, striving for a fit. But chances of surviving to adulthood range from under ten percent for most mammals and birds with highly developed parental care, to as low as one in millions, for example for big fish that lay immense numbers of eggs.
How can so harsh a world brim with life? The whole thing works because nature preserves not individuals, but the enterprise by which life struggles to survive, and adapts to changes. In other words, individuals disappear, species disappear—what survives is the process. The living enterprise continues because the process continues. To keep life alive, what’s important is: preserve the process.
That’s the big take-home message, so far, of a century and a half of biology and ecology: life is—more than anything else—a process; it creates, and depends on, relationships among energy, land, water, air, time, and various living things. It’s not just about human-to-human interaction; it’s not just about spiritual interaction. It’s about all interaction. We’re bound with the rest of life in a network, a network including not just all living things but the energy and non-living matter that flows through the living, making and keeping us all alive as we make it alive.
One note is not music. It is what lies between notes that makes the music. And what is between them is: their relationship. Relationships are the music life makes. Context creates meaning. Asking, ‘What is the meaning of life?’ is the wrong question; it makes you look in the wrong places. The question is, ‘Where is the meaning in life?’ The place to look is: between.”
What makes me feel alive is being near other living beings. And the more, the merrier. The people we love, the lands and waters we call home, the creatures that are our community, the planet that is all the mind, heart, and hope in the known universe. I’m acutely aware of how much those things matter. That’s what I focus on. That’s what makes me feel alive.
—Carl Safina
Transpersonal Yogini Diana Bourel
Dear Deborah,
Much of my time over the past 20 years has been spent creating emotional, psychic and spiritual spaces where people can heal, discover themselves, and connect to a greater universe. It is wonderful calling. I have traveled to the depths that the human heart can know. I have visited pain and sat in suffering. I have watched birds fly in formation as the human spirit soars, triumphantly to claim a new day, a second chance, a blank page. I have felt the drum roll of community and the need for it, like my own name. I have held more tears and sat in the company of more wisdom and more light and more victory than I can say. Each moment, each sitting, each encounter has made me feel alive. I never ever tire of the magic, the mystery and the wonder of life. And sometimes, I forget to remember how I feel about living and being alive.
That is when it punches me in the gut. That is when it shakes me out of bed and tells me to go look at the stars.
That is when it hushes me and rocks me like a baby. Sometimes it wells up, until from bone to skin and far beyond I am moving in a shimmering sea of feeling, of waves, of that from which I come. Sometimes, life comes like snow, or rain or fog and I fall to my knees, drawing in blessing, my mouth open, all innocence.
As a yogini, I strive to know life through a direct experience of it, as much of it as I can know, as I can see, as I can welcome and acknowledge.
On this day of beginning and celebration, I am glad for the twists that made my friend change seats-- a gesture that saved her life--so I would have the chance to one day meet her, to know and love her. On this day, I am glad for the twists that helped me to know that the very best thing I can become is fully myself. This Halloween, as I celebrate with Deborah and friends, I will not put on a mask. I will take it off.
One day, I will die. Today, I am alive. And so are you.
I offer you my poem, written in the wake of forgiveness, renewal, discovery and meditation.
It is called, ON A DAY LIKE THIS
Skipping rope with asparagus
Siami the Indian rubs my feet, my legs, all goodness.
I pay him 1, 200 baht, plus government tax.
I chant mantras in the steam cave alone
My voice, wrapping around its voluptuous curves, explodes,
Fire and steam stop to listen in awe.
I pet a young elephant, its hair is soft
i drive by a float, a lama inside, doing the neighborhood rounds
shakes water on me in blessing. I bow. Take it in, like rain on a hot day.
i drink bottled water in plastic by the seaside, hug my friends.
Give darshan to the New Zealand farmer whose music dances in my dreams.
After dinner, I use a toothpick.
Winnie stammers as he teaches tantric sound in yantra hall
I sing and play Tibetan bowls with him,
the hammered ones, raise my lips to the membrane of sound
edging toward me for the perfect kiss
On a day like today,
I unwrap love letters and try them on,
it is not until dawn comes that i know
All the poems have disappeared in my becoming.
When do you feel alive? You are welcome to the forum PLEASE ADD YOUR OWN THOUGHTS AND EXPERIENCES and we’ll add them to the forum.
Click here to read a selection of the inspirations, thoughts and comments from others.
